


Born Anew

by Dancingsalome



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 18:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8170937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dancingsalome/pseuds/Dancingsalome
Summary: She wakes up in a narrow bed, not knowing who she is, or why she is there.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GreenPhoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenPhoenix/gifts).



> Dear recipicent, I hope you will enjoy this story, even if it is not quite as dark as I originally intended for it to be.

She woke up, laying on her back in a narrow bed. Staring up at a ceiling she thought she recognised, dimly lit by flickering candlelight. The air felt cool in her lungs and her heartbeats were slow and heavy. Where was she? _Who_ was she? Experimentally she stretched up an arm, raising it above the high side of the bed. Someone had dressed her in white. She never wore white, did she? Moving her arm felt strange and unfamiliar, flexing her fingers more difficult than it ought to be. 

There was a strangled cry, and a face became visible above her. A man’s bearded face, haggard from grief and lack of sleep. She knew him, and knew she had never seen him like this before, not this red-eyed and frantic. Not even when Mina died. Her thoughts lurched after the name, trying to remember who Mina had been.

Strong arms lifted her, dragging her away from the bed and then the man collapsed on the floor with her, embracing her hard. Not until then did she realised the bed was really a coffin. The curtains of the room were drawn, hiding high windows and the night outside. 

“Vanessa,” the man whispered into her hair. “Oh my darling.”

She lay very still, his words sparking another memory, and she knew it was her name. Silently she formed her mouth around the vowels, then she said it out aloud.

“Vanessa. I am Vanessa.”

And then Vanessa knew who he was too, and she wrapped her stiff arms around Sir Malcolm's neck and buried her face in the cloth of his clothes. Memories swam in her mind like images, unconnected with each other, each containing a small piece of who she had been. Before she died. But she wasn’t dead anymore though she didn’t know why.

Sir Malcolm stirred. “We have to tell the others.”

Panic fluttered awake, and she clutched him harder. “No! No one must know about me. Promise me, to say nothing.”

“Why? This is a miracle.”

She couldn’t explain, there was still too much in her mind which seemed clouded and vague. 

“They have to think I’m still in that coffin. Bury it and erect a stone over it and let me stay dead for everyone but you. Do it for me, please.”

At first it looked like he would protest again, but then he nodded.

“I will.” He looked at the coffin and added. “I will fill it with something to weigh it down and seal the lid. I’ll do it as soon as I have put you to bed, before anyone else wakes up.”

He stood up, still with her in his arms as if she was light as a feather. With no further hesitation he carried her up the stairs. Vanessa remembered this was what he was like. A man who preferred action above else and who thought best on his feet.

“Not to my room,” she whispered, and he took her to his rooms instead. His bed felt unfamiliar under her body, but Vanessa curled up and fell asleep, before Sir Malcolm had left the room. The scant quarter of an hour that had passed since she woke up in the coffin had utterly exhausted her. She woke up briefly during the night to find Sir Malcolm asleep in an armchair by the bed. When she woke up the next time it was morning and Sir Malcolm was making himself ready for her funeral. While she slept her memory had pulled up more bits and pieces of herself. With her ear pressed against the closed door she could name the voices she heard in the hall. Names of people Vanessa loved, and she longed to step out to them, to say;

“Here I am. You don’t have to feel sad anymore.”

They would be shocked at first, but then they would be happy. They would mill around her, with questions and touches and the day would end with rejoicing, not sorrow. But she didn’t move, letting the funeral procession leave with the coffin they thought she was resting in. It was better this way. Clean grief would make way for a new life, where she didn’t have a place anymore. Without her, their lives would be easier. Better. Without her as the centre of a maelstrom of evil, they would be free. 

The first days she kept to Sir Malcolm’s room so Ethan wouldn’t find out about her. Mostly she slept, and when she woke up her dreams had made her was a little bit more herself. But there were also nightmares, terrible dreams she couldn’t recall when she awoke. Then Ethan left for Egypt and it was only her and Sir Malcolm left in the house. As it had been in the beginning, back when they had overcome resentment and pride in their quest for Mina’s freedom. She continued to sleep in his bed, but the second night she had asked him to sleep beside her. It felt safe to wake up with his still form like a wall between her the rest of the world. He never touched her, but even with Ethan gone he didn’t ask her to sleep anywhere else. 

Vanessa’s old room stood silent and deserted and she declined to have even a hairbrush brought to her from it. It was the room of a woman who was dead and she wanted nothing of what she had once owned. For a while she made do with Sir Malcolm’s shirts and dressing gowns until he came home one afternoon laden with parcels, boxes and bags.

“I took some of your old clothes to a seamstress and asked them to make a new wardrobe from the measurements,” he told her in a somewhat gruff voice.

When he unloaded the content all over the bedroom, Vanessa had to laugh at the sight, her first laugh in her new life. Instead of the black she had worn for so many years, her new clothes were a riot of colours. Blues and greens and reds, transforming the stark room into a lush garden. She held up an emerald green morning gown is soft velvet against herself. In the mirror she saw the colour teasing up a blush on her pale cheeks and a new lustre to her eyes and hair.

“For a new life, “ Sir Malcolm said and smiled. “I’ll leave you alone to try them on.”

For a while Vanessa was occupied with dressing and undressing, but then she glimpsed herself in the mirror in between changes and stopped to look closer. She slowly turned, studying herself. The brand on her back was still there, old but clearly visible. Then she looked at the twin scars at her throat, two pinpoints like stars. The bigger scar on her abdomen, only weeks old but healed and white against her already pale skin.

Vanessa touched her stomach remembering the flare of pain when the bullet tore through her. The anguish in Ethan’s face as she died in his arms. He had saved her soul, saved her. She was dead, not only to her friends, but to those who had haunted her all her life. In the back of her mind she had always sensed them, but not anymore. No darkness lurked inside her, waiting for a chance to sink its claws in her again. Death had washed her clean and then returned her to life. She was free too now, but if it was truly a gift to rejoice in, Vanessa didn’t know yet. 

The mirror reflected not only her, but Sir Malcolm who was standing in the doorway, staring at her. His presence had filled her childhood, even when he had been thousands of miles away. She had loved him and sometimes hated him, the need to be close to him something which had never fully left her. So much had changed, but he was still here. Theirs had always been a relationship fraught tension, but even now, when her life was a blank slate, she could not imagine her world without him.

Vanessa turned to face him and he strode through the room and kissed her. She answered it, but then she put her hands to his chest and pushed him away so she could look up at him.

“Are you my father? I have sometimes thought so.”

“I honestly don’t know. I might be, but I don’t care. I have graver sins on my conscience to torment myself with.”

“No,” Vanessa agreed. “It doesn’t matter,” and this time it was she who kissed him, hard and hungrily.

Once a demon with his face had bedded her, his eyes black. But Sir Malcolm’s grey eyes didn’t change and there were no nightmares that night.


End file.
